I understand her joy in dressing herself up after losing weight -- I have been doing that this whole shopping season and it feels great to fit into things and look good. {But I see the irony your comment brings out.}

A., a compassion-free zone, I guess. If Hudson does (let's call it relapse), and she can see what happened clearly, with humility, she could say that she allowed Barbie to oppress her. If she's in denial and want to blame, she'll just flat out play the victim. Time will tell... if we even get the opportunity.

Most people who lose weight do so just because they want to experience what it's like to be thin. Once the novelty of that wears off, they get bored and turn to other experiences to entertain them. Given that food is an extremely entertaining thing, this generally means they get fat again.

Motivation is everything in weight loss and it explains why so much weight loss is temporary - people just want it for poor reasons which are not sustainable once their acheive it.

I flesh out my comment, most Americans are hedonists, and if you have the means to buy food most hedonists choose to eat until they are fat. The ones who don't fill their lives with the kinds of activities they cannot enjoy when fat and try very hard to like those things more than they like to eat. This is one of the things which is reflected in Jennifer's comment.

This is why it's hard to be a hedonist and be thin - eating is just such an easy and pretty cheap way to amuse yourself.

The real cure for obesity in America can go one of 2 ways: 1) prevent people from eating so much, either through regulation or making them too poor to eat, or2) teach Americans not to be hedonists anymore.

Frankly given historical precidence, I would say the former is far more likely than the latter.

I don't see the reason for your reaction, Prof. Althouse. Ms. Hudson didn't bring up the Barbie comment spontaneously: it was an answer to a person who specifically asked what it's like to dress for her new weight. And Ms. Hudson didn't bring up oppression or victimization in any way.

Short of liposuction, I don't think it's possible to lose that much weight without first taking responsibility and admitting that your own habits led to the weight gain in the first place. Yes, she might relapse (the odds are against her), and she MIGHT play the victim as a result; but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion by any means.

I've never understood the whole argument for Emme, the plus-sized supermodel. Focusing solely on the beauty of a face isn't really less shallow than focusing on weight. It might even be less "empowering" in my view, because women have far less control of their facial features than they do over their weight.

~N - I am almost suprised by your reaction. I think that my statement was pretty clear and not at all snarky. I have done a lot of study and contemplation as to why people do the things they do and say the things they say, and it was a revalation when I realized the base mindset of most Americans was that of hedonism. The reason I'm not really suprised by what you say is I assume you don't really know what I'm talking about, otherwise I don't see how you could mistake my comment for snark.

When you come to realize what hedonism is and isn't, you see its ripples in many things. What Jennifer is discussing is her happy experiences of being thin. Focusing on experiences is what hedonism is all about - when asked how to live a good life a hedonist with any self-awareness will say it is to experience the best things you can. This mindset is so pervasive amoung our culture it's basically unspoken. It's so pervasive that most don't realize it's only one of several ways to live life.

When trying to understand why people have a hard time losing weight, if you realize what is basically motivating them it's quite easy to understand why they usually gain it back. They lose weight usually because they hate being fat, they are tired of it, and they long to be thin for the experience of being thin. When they lose the weight, they usually lose their hatred of being fat, and hedonistic adaption leads to them no longer enjoying the experience of being thin - they take it for granted and no longer value it. Thus, they lose their main motivation for losing weight, and unless they find another motivation to take its place, other motivations seep in, including the quite enjoyable experience of eating.

Well, most people don't study philosophy because it has been made boring and irrelevant by society. A little real searching, however, will reveal much of what moves the world in which we find ourselves is easy to see and understand. There is no new thing under the sun, after all, and learning what has happened in the past is an easy why of understanding what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future.